Convert MAX to USDZ
Free, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Drop your .max file in and take the .usdz away.
Drop your MAX file here
.max in, .usdz out. Bring its textures and sidecar files too
Choose filesNothing is uploaded No account, no email No file size limit
How to convert MAX to USDZ
- 01
Add your .max file
Drag your 3ds Max Scene file onto the drop zone, or click it to browse. Bring its textures and sidecar files in the same drop and they get wired back up.
- 02
Check the preview
The model is parsed on your machine and drawn in the viewport, so a wrong axis or a missing texture shows up before you commit rather than downstream.
- 03
Save the .usdz file
Press convert. The Universal Scene Description (zipped) file is written in the tab and lands in your downloads folder. No link, no expiry, no account.
What carries over, and what does not
A format conversion is a translation, and translations lose things. Here is what actually happens when an MAX file becomes a USDZ file.
| Data | MAX | USDZ | Survives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geometry | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Materials & colour | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Texture maps | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Animation & rigs | No | Yes | n/a |
| Scene hierarchy | Yes | Yes | Yes |
This is a comparatively lossless pairing: 4 of the five categories above are supported by both formats, so most of what is in your MAX file has somewhere to go in the USDZ file.
Bring the sidecar files
Drop the texture images in alongside the .max and they get wired back onto the materials.
About 3ds Max Scene
A .max file is 3ds Max’s own save format: an OLE2 compound document holding a class directory and a scene graph of nested binary chunks, with nothing about it published. Reading one here means walking that chunk tree directly: resolving every object against the class table, following the reference slots that connect a node to its transform, its geometry and its material, and pulling the vertex and face arrays out of Editable Poly and Editable Mesh objects. Standard, Physical, VRay, Corona and Arch & Design shaders come through with their PBR parameters, and Multi/Sub-Object assignments stay attached to the right faces. What does not come through is anything Max has to evaluate rather than store. Unfinished modifier stacks, NURBS, particle systems and procedural geometry are computed by the application, not stored in the file.
Commonly seen in: 3ds Max, architectural visualisation, game art, TurboSquid and other marketplaces. More on the MAX format page.
About Universal Scene Description (zipped)
USDZ is Pixar’s Universal Scene Description packed into an uncompressed zip archive, and it is the format Apple’s AR Quick Look expects. Send someone a .usdz link and iOS will drop the model into their living room straight from Safari or Messages, with no app to install. Under the hood USD is a full scene-composition system built for feature-film pipelines, of which USDZ exposes a deliberately narrow, single-asset slice.
Commonly seen in: AR Quick Look on iOS, Reality Composer, Safari, Shopify AR, Adobe Aero. More on the USDZ format page.
How the conversion works
When you drop a file in, the bytes are handed to a parser compiled to run in your browser. The MAX data is decoded into an in-memory scene graph of meshes, materials and transforms, which is what the preview is drawing. Pressing convert walks that scene graph back out through a USDZ writer and hands you the resulting bytes as a download.
The whole round trip is local. The page itself is static: it is delivered once and then does its work offline. That is why the privacy claim is checkable rather than a promise.
MAX to USDZ: common questions
Is my MAX file uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read by code running inside this browser tab and never crosses the network. You can prove it by disconnecting from the internet before you convert, the page keeps working, or by watching the Network tab in your browser's developer tools while you drop a file in.
How large an MAX file can I convert?
There is no server-side limit because there is no server. The practical ceiling is your own machine's memory: a browser tab can usually handle models up to a few hundred megabytes. Very dense scans or scenes with millions of triangles will take a few seconds and a lot of RAM.
Why does my converted USDZ file look untextured?
USDZ does support textures, but the images have to be available to embed. If your MAX file references texture images that live next to it on disk, drag those images into the drop zone along with the model and they will be picked up.
Does it cost anything?
No. There is no fee, no account, no watermark and no per-file limit. Since the conversion runs on your hardware rather than ours, serving this page costs about as much as serving a blog post.
Does it work on a Mac, on Windows or on a phone?
All of them. There is nothing to install: any browser with WebGL 2 will do, which covers current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on desktop, and Safari and Chrome on mobile. A phone has less memory than a laptop, so a very heavy scene may be the one thing it cannot finish.
Related conversions
Other things to do with the same file.
From MAX:
Other ways to get to USDZ:
Or do something else with it: